Marta: Once again, let's emphasize that not only in Krakow, but also in other cities, smaller rivers with potential should be taken care of and invested in besides the main river. Or even above all such, and the panel "Discovering Rivers" at this year's Biennale was about just that. Just is talking about it once every two years enough to make a difference?
Marcin: It's all in the mind, because we even have the tools to do it. It's a matter of being willing to use those tools. Please note that the City of Krakow, for example, has a City Architect who watches over spatial development, has the power to make important decisions and show the way. We also have a City Urban Planning and--Architectural Commission and we have local development plans. We also have the Association of Polish Architects and politicians. We have people dealing with the subject from the nature side: experts on plants, birds, water. We just need to be willing to use each other's knowledge and cooperate.
once along today's Jozef Dietl Street and Ignacy Daszynski Avenue ran the main (in Cracow) stream of the Old Vistula River - after it was decided to fill in the riverbed, in its place a wooded avenue called Dietl Planty was created; its park character of Dietla Street was finally lost in 1970; we know what the area looks like now, and what was it like before the roadway was widened, taking away more green areas? (from a presentation by Marcin Brataniec)
© illustrations from the archives of Marcin Brataniec
Marta: At the Biennale, all the interviewees unanimously agreed that it is necessary to act interdisciplinarily and in teams, they stressed that it is necessary and worth it. Then why doesn't it work?
Marcin: I won't answer why it doesn't work, because in my opinion it should. I am a designer, our studio eM4 . Architecture Studio. Brataniec consists of architects and landscape architects. We have design experience not only from Krakow, but also from Warsaw. We once designed a pavilion on the Vistula River there, and now we have won a competition for the Golędzin Natural Park along the Vistula. We see that there is holistic thinking in Warsaw. You can see these attempts to find out what the residents need, but also attempts to point it out to them, and the desire to implement the resulting visions. Not in Krakow, but in Warsaw, we had the pleasure of winning as many as three competitions. Unfortunately, in Krakow, despite our - the Krakow branch of SARP - strenuous attempts to persuade us to hold architectural competitions, the City is not interested in this form of project selection. This is in contrast to the Capital City, which has a wealth of experience on both the competition and implementation levels. We have already realized the Educational Pavilion "Stone" there, the reconstruction of the park named after the Cichociemni Paratroopers of the AK, and I hope that any moment now we will get down to the realization of the Golędzin Natural Park. The post-competition revitalized Warsaw Uprising Mound was recently put into operation there. Warsaw has been doing a lot for public spaces in recent years. The city has changed tremendously for the better, both with the participation of the community (by taking guidelines from residents and listening to their needs), but also through competitions.
Marta: And also thanks to the city authorities...
Marcin: Yes - a lot has also changed in Cracow, but I think there is still a lot ahead of us, and it is worth doing with the potential of the design community and scientists, in order to make the city more connected to all its rivers and rivers. I had the opportunity to live in Wroclaw for a while and I can see now how much it has changed, opened up to the river.
Marta: He kind of had no way out.
Marcin: He didn't have a way out with all those Odra canals, but there you can really see that the city lives on the river. And I think it is, however, a matter of top-down administrative decisions and determination to implement certain procedures, such as real public consultation. It is necessary to find out first what people need and expect and what they imagine. This does not at all mean that this is the final thing to do, because then one should incorporate professional knowledge into this and again talk to people, make them aware and convince them if necessary. In the end, a given problem should be looked at holistically, as individual groups analyze a close, rather narrow section of the topic for themselves. It is important that there is a constant flow of information both ways.
Marta: This is slowly starting to happen, or at least there is an emphasis on talking about how it should be done. Environmental education is also playing an increasingly important role.
Marcin: Yes, looking at cities these days, you can see the change in favor. Rivers are cleaner, cities are paying more attention to their relationship with the river. I'm going to be monotonous perhaps, but why, when it comes to designing the Vistula boulevard in Krakow or developing the embankments of the Ore Mountains, is there a tender for the cheapest design, and not a competition for the best design within the set price frame? And more serious challenges await us in the future. For example, we need to answer the question of whether we want to uncover fragments of the lost river or perhaps show its history in a different form.
once along today's Jozef Dietl Street and Ignacy Daszynski Avenue ran the main (in Cracow) current of the Old Vistula River - after it was decided to fill in the riverbed, in its place a wooded avenue called Dietl Planty was created; its park character of Dietla Street was finally lost in 1970; we know what the area looks like now, and what was it like before the roadway was widened, taking away more green areas? (from a presentation by Marcin Brataniec)
© illustrations from the archives of Marcin Brataniec
Marta: I think that we pay too much attention and finances to what is already working. After all, there are places that need immediate intervention. Some people say that something needs to be done with the Planty. They say they are boring, because nothing happens there: trees grow, flowers bloom and a paved path runs between low fences. Let's give some attention to areas in the city where even this is not present.
Marcin: As part of the Biennale, we tried to cite examples of concrete measures that have been implemented. There were cities from many countries shown, including those much wealthier than Poland. But it's not just a question of money. It depends on mentality and the ability to make ethical decisions, and to look into the future in the long term and assess what will pay off spiritually and economically.
The Norwegians, for example, are currently implementing a major program to restore rivers around Oslo. There were quite a few of these examples at the biennial presentations, and they are concrete actions. We are now at such a point that the time has come for decisions and action. Poles have already bought themselves new refrigerators, cars, we've done bathroom renovations and pulled down paneling, and Krakow has implemented the Landscape Act and cleaned up public space. And one of the main public spaces has always been rivers.
The buildings on Jozef Dietl Street, photo: Ignacy Krieger, circa 1895 (from a presentation by Marcin Brataniec).
© illustrations from Marcin Brataniec's archive
Marta: A lot of good has come from covid in our way of thinking. We finally began to notice that what we have closest to us and surrounds us is important. When the absurd ban on entering the forest was introduced, overnight we lost access to what we thought would always be available and unlimited. We realized that it had to be taken care of, because someone or something could take it away from us. When we couldn't kill time in a shopping mall or a movie theater, or fly off on a long-distance vacation, we found that the most valuable things were the immediate neighborhood and places to spend time outdoors.
Marcin: Two processes overlap here. On the one hand, we are saturated with the space within our house or apartment, and we begin to look outside. We begin to understand that it could be nice around here, too. There should be a comfortable bench, a view of something nice and it would be best to have it close by. On the other hand, the pandemic has given us an understanding of how important it is for our spiritual, mental and physical health to be in contact with nature and in general to be together in public spaces. And rivers are both key axes of nature and communal spaces, because cities were built by the river and people met by the river, bridges were built, commerce and infrastructure developed. And now, when we look for a city for ourselves and to stay together, we naturally return to the river. And when we don't happen to live by the Vistula River, which is the case for most people in Poland, we begin to pay attention to the little river, that sometimes it's enough to pick up trash, better develop the valley and put up a few benches and it will be quite nice. But this is also the moment of realization that someone took it away from us before, or that we ourselves led to the loss of the charm of the place. And here I recommend Maciej Robert's book "Rivers That Are Not There." We should take a look at the phenomena described in it.
Marta: I will quote the words with which you ended your speech before the panel discussion "Discovering Rivers": "Let's think together about where we are going!". Where to?
Marcin: Well, that's exactly it. As you may have noticed, I tried to select the guests in such a way as to look at the topic from different sides. We had Peter Kempf, i.e. an administrative employee, a civil servant, who is trying to translate into reality what we would like to create. We also had Malgorzata Kuciewicz of the Centrala Design Group, who, along with Simone De Iacobis, talks a lot about the directions we can go. On the surface, their visions, such as a return to the swamps and floodplains in Warsaw, are detached from reality, but when you take a closer look, theyvery specific demands for a return to nature, to water retention, emerge, and it is possible to translate their words into very specific indications, this is something that I greatly appreciate in their work. We had the dean of the Faculty of Environmental Engineering at the Cracow University of Technology - Professor Stanislaw Rybicki is an engineer, he knows how to calculate flows, what they entail, he knows what kind of phenomena can give rise to threats. We also had Alek Janicki, who is an open artistic mind, and who participates in the work of discovering the river in Katowice. The intention was for this discussion not to be purely dreamy, to show the complexity of the river discovery process. Director Kempf said what a difficult and arduous process it is for administrative, legal, ownership reasons, not to mention money. Professor Rybicki, on the other hand - I will gladly repeat it again in this conversation - said one of the most important sentences during the discussion: "It's not enough to discover the river, you have to take responsibility for it." An uncovered river brings dangers, such as the threat of flooding. And furthermore, we need to know whether what we want to discover is worth the discovery. After all, these rivers were once covered for some reason, so if we decide to return to them, we need to properly prepare for it.
Perspective shot of Jozef Dietl Street, photo: Ignacy Krieger Photographic Company, early 20th century (from a presentation by Marcin Brataniec)
© illustrations from Marcin Brataniec's archive
Marta: I really liked the way the group of interviewees was constructed. Although I admit that for a moment I had a thought: if there is so much talk about public consultations, why is there no representative of residents in this group? But after all, it could not be a random person from the street asked if he or she would like to participate in the discussion. And any person who, for some reason, would come to your mind as a potential guest, it would no longer be an average resident, but an expert who is well versed on a certain slice of the subject.
Marcin: This is a very important question: where is the resident? I considered, however, that each of these discussants is at the same time a resident. I don't particularly like the concept of public consultation in the form it is often implemented in our country, that is, throwing a questionnaire somewhere in a corner, which three people fill out, so that later no one can accuse us that there was no consultation. It should be a process: we ask the people, but also then we give it to professionals, we make a competition, but at the end we again give it to the people for review so that they can make their comments. It doesn't mean that all of them will be taken into account, that's impossible, but some of them can be developed.
Marta: And wouldn't this end up like giving the MSP for review? People have the opportunity to make comments, but they don't understand what they're looking at because they can't read the maps according to the legend, they don't understand the concepts that appear, and even if they can, they don't make comments because they don't know how it would look.
Marcin: To understand each other, you have to start talking to each other. That's what the Biennale was also meant to do. It's like learning a foreign language: to learn to talk, you must first learn to speak. This is how to learn the language of an urban planner, civil servant or economist, which is foreign to us. Preparing models, organizing open-air walks, civic budgets can help. This requires good will and openness. Finding a common language of conversation is a task for all of us.
A good example: the Hase River, Osnabrück, Germany, development project: Müller Wehberg Landschaftsarchitekten (from a presentation by Marcin Brataniec)
© illustrations from the archives of Marcin Brataniec
Marta: This is what your last question to director Piotr Kempf was about, whether he sees the possibility of strengthening the networking stage, that is, using knowledge from different sources and from different people. In response to the question, "Do you see the possibility of us working together with the Urban Greenery Board just like that and in different formulas?" the director answered: "Definitely yes." He then elaborated on this answer, adding that he doesn't know if it would be easier to act this way. And do you think it will be easier this way?
Marcin: I think it will be just like in sports, playing an instrument, learning a language or any other activity that we gradually learn. In the beginning everything is difficult, then what was once unfeasible we consider a basic and reflex skill. This is also the case with teamwork. Working together breeds difficulties, but most tasks cannot be solved alone. Architects, scientists, civil servants and politicians know this well. It is time to act together. I consider the declaration of the director of the Board of Urban Greenery, the person with the greatest influence on the shape of Krakow's streets, parks and rivers, to cooperate with social circles, with scientists, universities, designers and SARP, to be the best prognosticator for the development of the common spaces of our city.
Marta: Thank you for the interview.
